“I figured it was the least I could do.”
He looks into the glass, at the shreds of pulp slowly separating, sinking to the bottom, and then takes a longer drink.
“There’s something wrong with me,” he says, swallowing.
“There’s not, Pauly. He was an asshole.”
“He may have been an asshole, but there’s still something wrong with me.”
She pulls his head to her shoulder and runs her fingers through his hair. She wants to say something, but she can’t. Comforting her siblings—a task that, as the eldest sister, she knows falls squarely on her shoulders—has always confounded her. On the one hand she wants to fix them, to save them, to pull Paul and Alice up and out of the messes they’ve made. On the other hand, though, she worries that her own gilded life somehow prevents her from empathizing with them as deeply as she should. More than that, she worries that her siblings’ perception of her life puts her at an inevitable and insurmountable disadvantage: she has, and that means she can’t.
Paul finishes his orange juice, and she thinks of the things Alice said to her in the bathroom during the hen do. You just don’t get it, Eloise. You just don’t fucking get it.
Maybe they’re right, she thinks, as she slumps farther into the couch and Paul starts to cry. Maybe I just don’t get it, and maybe I never will. After all, here’s Paul, her little brother, weeping on her shoulder, and she can’t think of a damned thing to say. She knows what she should tell him. She should give him some pep talk about being okay, about everyone being okay. She should talk about how awfully banal breakups are, and how that fact is actually entirely humanizing. She should remind him how heartbreak is a universal emotion; how everyone, everywhere, has experienced what he’s feeling at this exact moment, and in that way Paul, through his pain, is becoming part of something larger than himself.
The problem is that it’d all be a lie. She’d be rehashing a speech she gave to a suitemate at Yale whose boyfriend broke up with her in the middle of freshman year. Some girl whose name she can’t remember. The fact is that Eloise has never been dumped. She’s broken up with people, sure, but it’s always been amicable, at least on her end; and now, watching her brother cry, she suddenly suspects the only people who share her holistic and delusional perspective on heartbreak are people exactly like her—people who’ve never actually been heartbroken.
The only thing she can do, she realizes, is let him cry—let him cry and, when he asks if he can smoke a cigarette out of her bathroom window, answer with an empathic yes.
“In fact,” she says, “don’t worry about going to the bathroom. Let me just get you something to ash in.”
She goes to the kitchen and returns with an old mug.
“Won’t Ollie be mad?” Paul looks up at her with red eyes. “About the smell, I mean.”
“He’ll understand. Besides, I think I’ve got some air freshener under the sink.”
He lights his cigarette and collapses into the love seat. Eloise sits next to him, pulling her feet up and holding her knees to her chest. The sun coming through the windows illuminates streaks of dust on the coffee table in front of them.
“What if I’m unlovable?” he says. Ash falls onto his shirt.
“Oh, come on. Of course you’re lovable.” She reaches over to brush hair out of his eyes.
“You don’t know that. The only thing you’ve ever been is loved.” He blows out a long, thin cloud of smoke.
“That’s not true.”
He doesn’t answer her—she wasn’t expecting him to. Instead, he says, “Or maybe it’s not that I’m inherently unlovable. Maybe it’s that I make it too difficult to keep on loving me.” More ash falls to his shirt. “I think I’ve somehow become my own worst enemy.”
“Mark was an asshole, Paul.”
“I think that’s probably true.”
“So you should be happy that you’re done with him.”
He’s only halfway through his cigarette, but he drops the rest of it into the mug, stubbing the butt against the cracked porcelain.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the way it works,” he says.
“It is if you want it to.”
“God,” he says, his voice cracking, “I wish I knew what it was like to be you.”
PART THREE
If a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will,
there’s nobody like a relative to do the business.
—WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Vanity Fair
Paul
July 9
“I can’t fit back there.”
Paul looks into the backseat of the Peugeot, cupping his hands on either side of his eyes as he presses his face against the window.
“A fucking Chihuahua couldn’t fit back there.”
“Well, this is the car that Mom’s rented.”
Alice glances down at her phone before slipping it into her purse, discouraged.
“Well, go tell her to get a bigger one.”
“Too late,” Alice says. She’s wearing dark glasses that hide half her face. “This is the last one they’ve got.”
Paul stands up straight again and wipes sweat from the back of his neck. Slough spreads around them on all sides, the British equivalent of the same Midwest suburbs where he and Alice wallowed away eighteen years of their lives. A plane of gray duplexes and strip malls, dotted with ancient brick houses and the occasional medieval church. He looks across the Hertz parking lot and counts the number of full-sized sedans he sees.
“There are sixteen other reasonably sized cars here,” he says. “And that’s just on this side of the rental office. Who knows what sort of glorious minivans we might find on the other side.”
“They’re all rented.” Alice leans against the Peugeot.
“Every single one of them.”
“It’s vacation season, Paul. Everyone’s driving to the beach. They need cars.”
“Well, I need leg room. And I’m grieving.”
When Alice doesn’t respond, he asks, “Why is this thing in Dorset?”
“I don’t know.” Then: “Ollie went to school down there or something.”
“The British and their goddamned traditions. We went to school next to a cornfield in Illinois. You don’t see us planning our weddings there.”
Alice scrapes something from underneath her fingernail. “You don’t see us planning our weddings, period.”
Paul fills his cheeks with air, then exhales. “How long is the drive?”
“Google Maps puts it at about two and a half hours. But that’s without traffic.”
“Two and a half hours? Aren’t we already pretty far south, and isn’t England smaller than New Jersey?”
“Take it up with Google.”
Paul watches as Donna emerges from the rental office, a road atlas of England tucked under her left arm. She’s wearing khaki pants, a light blue camisole, and a pair of sensible shoes—the kind that are sold at places like Talbots and Eileen Fisher under the dubious pretense of being fashionable, while also serving vague and unnamed orthopedic functions. Aging is a sudden process, Paul thinks, as his mother navigates a minefield of cement parking barriers. And despite her best efforts, Donna suddenly got old.